Episode c3d 007 The Humanistic Approach to Sales and Marketing

Introduction

Week three of your seriously social journey, a path that changed the way I do business forever and whose benefits regularly surprise me in terms of the opportunities they generate. One of our biggest challenges is the balance between selling to the new and servicing the old.

It is easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large but jump day is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever.

One of the challenges in an established business as you continue to scale is finding that happy medium between servicing the existing clients and maintaining those relationships and acquiring new clients that help you to continue to grow. In today’s show we take what we have covered in the previous episodes and evaluate the challenges and opportunities in getting this right.

IBGR is committed to your success and our programming is designed to give you the tools and resources as well as the one percenters you might be missing that are the difference between feeling like you are treading water and chasing your tail versus on the up track and master of your domain..

Have a fantastic week, hopefully we have turned your hump day into jump day and you are all fired up for success.


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Show Objectives – The Why
Striking the right balance between new and existing customers can make you a happy camper – or leave you running in place. The reality of most businesses is that investment in acquiring new customers comes at the expense of nurturing relationships with existing ones, and vice versa. Herein lies the great importance of optimizing the company’s new-to-existing customer revenue ratio, what we call the “customer revenue mix.”

​Key Issues – Owner Perspective:

1. What is the ideal revenue mix between new and existing customers?
2. Is there a correlation between the customer revenue mix and a company’s success?
3. Customer retention strategies versus acquisition strategies
4. Handing over key accounts as you scale
5. How to balance your sales time between prospecting and nurturing

What You Need to Know – The What

1. Analyzing your customer ratios
2. How does your mix balance against your stage of evolution as a company
3. What retention and acquisition strategies do we have in place and what are we missing
4. What is our process for our customers journey with our team
5. Balancing resource allocation and automation to keep everyone happy and maintain growth..

​What You Need to Do​​ – The How

1. Basic customer ratio calculations to health check your exposure or opportunity.
2. Complete review of resource allocation to account management versus acquisition
3. What are the touch points we maintain with our existing customers personal and automated? Are we actually executing them or did we just put them in our strategy document.
4. Identify who has the best retention in the organisation and why
5. Identify who has the best acquisition ratio to lead and why
6. Make a list of and review all of your marketing plans for acquisition and retention and identify opportunities for improvement.

Shows
Previous: Episode C3.008 Identify New Users for Existing Offer  
Next: Episode C3.010 Customer Recovery

Written by Simone Douglas 
The Publican & Licensee of the Duke of Brunswick Hotel, Executive Director for BNI Adelaide North one of the biggest networking organisations in the world, the driving force behind South Australia’s leading social media agency, Digital Marketing AOK and now best-selling author with her first book “Seriously Social – turning your online game into real-world gain”.

You can connect with Simone on any of her seriously social platforms
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IBGR 0:05
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Simone Douglas 2:36
Okay, and we’re back. You’re listening to IBGR network. IBGR is our call sign as a radio station and a pretty epic radio station at that. I’m your host, Simone Douglas. This is Episode Seven in our C lane at IBGR.network sales and marketing. Go to our website IBGR.network and download the show notes. If you’ve missed the start of the show we’re into the final stages and wrapping up what it is that you actually need to do and health checking by giving my tips for success. So the challenge in any market or environment is making the most of your customers as a resource once you have them and retaining them as much as humanly possible. So I’m going to give you my simple to do list that I apply in all of my businesses to maximise that result.

So if we go back to the very beginning, the first thing that you want to be doing is utilising the NPS question or the net promoter score. Have your reps, call all your clients, or if you’re in retail, have an automated email or text message. One question on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends. As you get those results, make sure you act on those results, so if they’re in the top marks, or they’re between 7 and 10 these are your promotors, they are your best friends. They are also the people that are most likely to refer to you and to pass on your business details or become brand advocates. So how identify in your business how you’re going to harness that? How you’re going to increase that wallet share are all more importantly, or as importantly, how are you going to increase word of mouse? Now, as I said, mouse, not mouth. In our digital world, the reality is that in five seconds or less, someone can make or break your brand, so it’s really important that you maximise and make the most of your promoters, particularly on your social media. So if you’ve got people that are regularly tagging in your business, and they’re helping you to get your brand out there and it’s positive, they’re in that promoter bracket, reward them by engaging them in conversation. And this is where we get to the human part of sales and marketing or that humanistic approach. Those people that are really successful in business, the ones that really make the most of what’s in front of them are the ones that make friends. And online, it’s really important that you spend the time to make friends even more than perhaps you do in any other way. So again, think about those things and how you’re engaging with those customers. Act on the results when they’re in the bottom end, okay? So if they’re in that 1 to 4 bracket, start trying to save those accounts, you’re about to lose them, I can pretty much guarantee it. And if you’re not about to lose them, they’re still not doing your brand any favours. So make sure that you’re getting out there and looking at ways to fix that.

From there, evaluate your service offering and product mix. So where are you falling down? How do you fix it? So what are the things that you’re not offering that realistically, you need to start looking at diversification or adding on services. Where are the gaps to that? Is it that you need to recruit skills in house? Is it that you need to forge partnerships out of your house with other houses or other businesses? You know, so how are you fostering and cultivating relationships with the people who are aligned with what you do but not competitive with what you do? These people are key to your business success. The more those people that you have as friends in business, the more sticky your customers will be. It will also create that network of people who regularly refer you work, so one of the easiest ways to evaluate something stuff is look at where you’ve referred things out of your business. Look at where you’ve sent customers elsewhere to buy things, and is there an opportunity to close that gap? So we talked right at the beginning about closing the gap between you know the relationship with your customer or closing the loop. So what you want to make sure that you’re doing here is identifying where that’s falling down and is it time to actually broaden our service offering? Or is it time to partner with somebody else effectively in a way that is a win win for both companies or both businesses, so that we’re getting the most out of our customers without losing them. And then we need to actually sit down and identify the roadblocks and the green light signals that mean stop or go on expanding or rescuing a customer segment. So routinely in my sales and marketing meetings, we will have a conversation with the teams around what are the roadblocks you’ve been hitting? What have your customers been complaining to you about? You know, have you opened the door to let them complain? Because another one of the things that you really want to do is make sure that your sales teams are good at looking for constructive feedback. We’re always really happy to get the idea of the product is fantastic or the service was fantastic, but we need to ask some more diligent questions to dig deeper, and find out more about what’s going on for our customers, because maybe it’s something similar. I actually, you know, this week I bought a product, a very expensive product over $3,000. And I had an issue with it and the only way that I could contact anyone on the service department was just lodge support ticket. Now support tickets are fine if you get a response within 24 business hours, you know, and in today’s modern age, more like five business hours. Seven days later, I’m still waiting for a response. You know, the upshot of that meant I started stalking people on LinkedIn, which you know, no offence, but I’m pretty good at that. So I found the head of the company I’ve found the head of HR, I found their legal adviser and I messaged all of them my support ticket number and said, for a $3,000 price tag, you would think that I would get response much quicker than within seven days, and I still hadn’t had a response. Funnily enough overnight while I was sleeping my problems got solved.

Okay, so having conversations with your team about, you know, what were the green light signals, etc. You had a massive sales meeting this week, when did you know you’d won the contract? Okay, so then coaching teams on emotional intelligence as well and EQ, so that they can build on their natural skills. Okay, so we all have people on our sales teams who are really gold at relationship based selling, they do it really well. You know, by having them talk about what’s going on for them, the rest of the team will step up a level. So you know, make sure that you set aside time to look at that and identify those roadblocks and the green light signals. Okay, and then you get to a point where you want to make sure that you’re utilising your social media marketing to educate your customers on your offers and your value ads. Now, there are so many different ways to do this. So the first thing that’s really important to do is identify where your customers are playing and what, what reasons they are on what networks, okay. So you might think that Facebook and Instagram are going to be perfect for your business. But you know, if you do a little bit of digging and have some conversations with the customer, it might turn out that LinkedIn is actually where you need to be playing, and LinkedIn is a very different platform to play on, so you want to make sure that if you are, if you’ve identified that LinkedIn is going to come down to personal brand cloud aligned with your business. So have you educated your sales teams on how to do that effectively? What are the rules of engagement? How are they meant to play? How are they starting those conversations with their ideal prospects? How are they maintaining front of mind with their existing customers in a way that allows their customers and networks to see what it is that you’re talking about? So when we use social media marketing effectively from an organic content point of view, it’s really about pre-qualifying and educating customers on our offers, and on what makes us different to everybody else.

Now, the digital marketplace is ridiculously loud. Okay, it is full of white noise, there are so many different things and aspects to look at. So what we really want to make sure that we’re doing in this particular instance, is making the most of that marketplace by giving yourself a unique personality and tone of voice. So when you do that, and you run through all of these things, what you’ll find is that you will get the most out of your customers. So just remember that getting customers takes the most amount of resources and energy. It’s what you do with them once you have them that really matters. So if you’re going to set yourself up for success and spend the time reviewing your wallet share by implementing regular check ins and taking a good look at your customer base is behaviour that will allow you to continue to increase both your net worth and your network. Okay, so all of those things are really important. When we get to those things, what that allows you to do is if you’ve programmed that into your daily, weekly, and monthly flow, then you’ll find that your sales become much easier. So if you’re consistently reviewing those things, and you’ve got a good 90 day rolling plan in place that has those priorities for you around wallet share, and those things that you want to achieve, all of this stuff will become easy. So what I recommend that you do is go back, have a look at your share with your customers have a look at the relationships that you have with them and how you can improve those and get some clarity, and all of those things will allow you to get the most out of what it is that you’re doing.

So next week, we’re going to be talking about identifying new users or customers. For an existing offer, so this is really about broadening your networks, broadening your customer base, the easy way. So by all means, make sure that you’re tuning in. You are all set for the next episode of the day very shortly, you also spoilt so you have the pleasure of listening to the dulcet tones of Richard Miller. He’s a branding giant on the world of advertising and marketing, his show building brands and selling stuff. So he’s going to take you through the crazy and often confusing world of marketing metrics, and more importantly, the ones that matter. So, Richard’s, a very good friend of mine I’ve known him for a number of years and I’m super excited to have him on the station. He has worked with all and sundry and is well and truly a man of advertising. So hopefully you’ll be able to hang around. His show is on directly after mine and that will allow you to make the most of your marketing day. So what we want you to do on a Wednesday is turn your Hump Day into jump day. So make the most of your business by working on new business on a Wednesday and really health checking your sales and marketing streams, making sure that you are set up for success. And you’re moving through the week in a way that has you end on a high. We always want you to be celebrating you’ve been listening to seriously social the humanistic approach to sales and marketing, episode c 007. Opportunities to increase your shareholders